In general, it is necessary in a sewing process to match the pattern of cloth with a pattern. For example, as shown in FIG. 9A, in the case of sewing a pocket 1 onto the body of a garment 2, stripes 3 and 4 of a striped pattern or the body of a garment 2 need to be matched to the striped pattern of the pocket 1, as illustrated in FIG. 9B which shows an enlarged diagram of the portion A surrounded by a broken line in FIG. 9A. Consequently, as shown in FIG. 10, in the case of blocking pockets from pieces of cloth 7 which have been smoothed out to eliminate wrinkles by an extending and smoothing apparatus 5 and which have been laid on a Table 6, the cloth pieces 7 are cut so that the patterned stripes are located at almost the same position on blocked cloth 8. However, the stripes on the cloth pieces 7 are not always located at the same position because they are shifted in the case of the extended and smoothed pieces of cloth 7. As a result of this, the stripes on the blocked cloth pieces 7 also become out of line and it is necessary to match the patterns to correct the mismatching of the stripes on the blocked pieces of cloth 8. In order to match the patterns, a pin sticking plate 10 having pins 9 as shown in FIG. 11A is placed on the Table 6 as shown in FIG. 10 and the blocked pieces of cloth 8 are put on the pin sticking plate 10 as shown in FIG. 11C in such a manner that the cloth pieces 8 are observed one by one to ensure that the striped patterns 11 always coincide with each other such that, for example, one stripe 11 is located on a line passing through two pins as shown in FIG. 11B. The matched pieces of cloth, are finely cut to a predetermined shape, for instance, like a pocket, by a fine-cutting apparatus 12 using a fine-cutting blade 13 as shown in FIG. 12.
However, in such a pattern matching method, this work is manually performed by observing the blocked cloth pieces 8 one by one so that each stripe 11 is always located on a line passing through two pins 9, and this involves the problem that efficiency is very low.